Can the luxury business survive a change in Japanese tastes?

My friend Vanessa Friedman, who has the incongruous title of fashion editor of the Financial Times, has a new video up on the FT site. It’s kind of long, and weirdly serious in tone, but the story Vanessa tells is fascinating: Japanese consumers, who have kept the global luxury-brand business going for the past 20-odd years, have begun to realize that there might be more to life than Vuitton bags. So the luxury guys are all banking on Chinese consumers becoming just as big suckers for overpriced European brand names as their not-so-friends across the East China Sea. And so far, it’s going great.